Training Faculty

Description

Lorenz Clinic of Family Psychology — Greater Minneapolis St Paul Area, Full-Time | Doctoral Degree Required | Formation-Based Clinical Training Institute

The Institutional Context

Something has shifted in behavioral health training. The institutions that once held clinicians well — university programs with genuine intellectual communities, postdoctoral environments with time to think, clinical institutes with formation at their center — are under unprecedented pressure. Many have contracted, consolidated, or quietly stopped doing the formative work that made them worth belonging to.

Lorenz Clinic is building in the other direction.

We are a multi-site outpatient family psychology practice organized around a serious proposition: that the relational environment a clinician inhabits during training is not incidental to their development — it is the curriculum. We believe clinics are not merely service delivery systems. At their best, they are civic institutions — places where human beings are shaped into the kinds of practitioners, leaders, and citizens upon whom a fragile democratic society depends. We take that seriously. Not as aspiration. As architecture.

Our clinical  training programs span the full formation ladder: practicum, post-master's fellowship, clinical supervision, and leadership development across five sites. Together they constitute a formation system designed to move clinicians through developmental thresholds — from earliest supervised practice through independent licensure, through the stewardship of supervision, and toward the civic practice of clinical leadership — with deliberate containment at each stage.

Our long-range vision is to be a clinical training institute: therapy, training, research, and clinical leadership development operating in concert. Not a clinic that trains. An institute that treats and forms the field. 

We are looking for a Training Faculty member who understands what it would mean to help build that.

The Formation Ladder

What distinguishes serious clinical training from credential production is a willingness to name and hold developmental thresholds explicitly — to treat professional formation as a staged process with real transitions, not a continuous accumulation of hours and signatures.

We organize training around a conviction that each stage of clinical development involves a qualitative shift in what is being held — not just more skill, but a different object of responsibility. Practicum students learn to hold themselves in role and hold the client system. Post-master's fellows consolidate clinical identity and develop the first forms of independent judgment. Clinical supervisors cross the most consequential threshold: they become responsible not only for their own work, but for the conditions under which others develop. Managers and directors learn to hold teams and systems. At the highest levels of clinical leadership, the object of responsibility expands to the institution itself — and to its obligations beyond its own walls.

Training Faculty work across this entire developmental arc. Their work is not remediation. It is formation. And formation, as we practice it, is a deliberate discipline: named thresholds, explicit authority, deliberate pacing, and the willingness to say not yet when the stakes require it.

Training Faculty work within a structured faculty model led by an Associate Training Director, who holds program-level stewardship for the formation rung. The Associate Training Director reports directly to the CEO, who holds the full formation ladder and maintains direct involvement in the intellectual and developmental architecture of the training program. Training Faculty carry active scope within the program — clinical, supervisory, and pedagogical — and work in close coordination with training leadership. This is a practitioner-level faculty role, not a program director role. Candidates seeking program leadership or administrative authority over a training program should look to the Associate Training Director posting, which is posted concurrently.

What This Role Actually Does

Training Faculty at Lorenz Clinic carry a full scope. This is not a role designed for clinicians seeking to reduce their clinical load through a leadership title. The formation work is additive. It requires more presence, not less — more relational exposure, not less — more tolerance for complexity, not less. The clinical caseload is part of the role. So is everything else.

Depending on fit and organizational need, scope includes:

• Direct clinical work — an active outpatient caseload as a licensed clinician. Training Faculty are practicing clinicians first. The credibility of the formative role depends in part on remaining inside the clinical work, not above it. We do not separate clinical practice from training leadership. We believe they inform each other, and we expect Faculty to inhabit both.
• Seminar design and facilitation — holding the learning group as a system, not merely delivering content. Our seminars are not workshops. They are apprenticeships in stewardship, designed to be experienced as living examples of what good systems feel like: theory made lived experience, enactment processed rather than avoided, tone-holding modeled as a leadership act. What happens between participants — the friction, the recognition, the rupture and repair within the cohort — is not incidental to learning. It is the learning. Fostering between-participant interaction and experience within cohorts is a primary pedagogical method and a non-negotiable feature of our seminar design. A facilitator who lectures well but cannot hold a group is not the facilitator we are looking for.
• Clinical supervision — of practicum students, post-master's fellows, or supervisors themselves, depending on placement and need across sites.
• Supervision of supervision — working with clinical supervisors as the primary unit of reflective practice. The supervisor bench is the most important structural variable in the system. Faculty who can hold supervisors developmentally — who can distinguish rescue behavior from reflective functioning, and intervene without collapsing the supervisory frame — are doing the most upstream work available in the formation model.
• Consultation — to reflective pods, clinical teams, or training program architecture. Group-level consultation is central to how we understand organizational learning.
• Curriculum development — building and refining formational curriculum across training tracks, with attention to how competency attainment in the practicum maps onto PMF-level formation and beyond.
• University partnership stewardship — maintaining and deepening relationships with graduate training programs across the region. These relationships are how the formation pipeline begins. They require both academic credibility and relational continuity.

This is a full role. It requires genuine presence — not managed availability, not partial engagement, not the version of leadership that looks like showing up for the interesting parts. The right candidate will read that sentence and feel confirmed, not cautioned.

The Seminar as a Formation Container

We hold a specific view of what a seminar is. It is not a lecture. It is not a workshop. It is a system — and like all systems, it has a primary task, a boundary, and a culture that either supports or undermines the work.

In our seminars, between-participant experience is the pedagogical engine. What participants bring from their own clinical encounters, their supervision relationships, and their developing professional identities becomes the material. The facilitator's task is to hold the conditions under which that material can be examined — without the room retreating into performance, defensive consensus, or the comfort of pure content delivery.

This requires someone who knows what it means to hold a group — not just teach one. Who understands the difference between a room that is thinking and a room that is defending. Who can name a here-and-now dynamic without making it a clinical intervention. Who has been inside a learning system that defended against learning, and knows how to recognize that process without becoming a casualty of it.

Tavistock, A.K. Rice, Bion's theory of groups, the Leicester tradition — these are not required credentials. They are the grammar of the work. Candidates who have been formed in those traditions will recognize immediately what is being described. Candidates who haven't but are drawn to it will find a home here.

The Civic Horizon

Clinicians who are well formed — who have experienced genuine supervisory holding, who have been inside a learning system that took their development seriously, who have practiced the relational and reflective capacities required for good clinical work — carry something into the world. They carry it into the families they treat, into the systems they eventually lead, and into the civic fabric they inhabit. Clinics that take this seriously are not merely health care organizations. They are, as we have come to understand it, civic foundries — places where human beings are shaped into the kinds of clinical citizens upon whom the future of the field depends.

That may sound big for a job posting. We mean it precisely.

The Training Faculty member we are looking for understands that clinical training with this kind of intentionality is civic work within our profession. That forming a clinician to tolerate ambiguity, to repair rupture rather than avoid it, to hold authority without dominance, is preparation not only for clinical practice but for participation in the social fabric at a moment when that fabric is under serious strain.

This is why we are building an institute, not just a training program. And this is why the faculty role is not an administrative position with a teaching component. It is a position of full clinical and intellectual engagement — with all the accountability that entails.

Requirements

Who Excels Here

The right candidate has likely spent time in higher education — as a faculty member, postdoctoral fellow, or advanced graduate student — and has developed serious competencies in teaching, clinical supervision, and group facilitation. They may be re-evaluating what a professional home looks like. Not because they failed at the academic trajectory, but because the landscape has shifted in ways that no longer honor the work they actually care about.

They are drawn to the idea of an institute that takes clinical training seriously as an intellectual, relational, and civic discipline. They want to contribute to something being built with care and intention, not administer something already calcified.

They are still seeing clients and intend to keep doing so. The clinical work is not something they are moving away from. It is something they want to think more carefully about — inside a community that takes that thinking seriously.

They have a felt sense of what happens in a group when authority is unclear, when boundaries dissolve, when a learning system defends against the very thing it is supposed to produce. They have been in those rooms. They know how to name what is happening without making it worse.

They do not need a university to feel like they are doing serious work. But they need the work to be serious.

Minimum Requirements

• Doctoral degree in psychology, marriage and family therapy, social work, or related field (PhD, PsyD, EdD, or equivalent)
• Independent licensure in Minnesota, or eligibility to obtain
• Active clinical practice and commitment to maintaining a therapy caseload
• Demonstrated competency in clinical supervision
• Graduate-level teaching or seminar facilitation experience
• Genuine grounding in systemic and relational clinical frameworks

Preferred Qualifications 

• Formal training in group relations, group dynamics, or organizational consultation (Tavistock, A.K. Rice, Bion study, Friedman, or equivalent)
• AAMFT Approved Supervisor designation or equivalent
• Experience supervising supervisors or providing organizational consultation
• Active scholarly interests in clinical training, supervision science, reflective practice, or group process
• Reflective Supervision or Mentalization-based frameworks training 
• Research background or publication record in clinical training or related domains

What We Offer

• A serious intellectual community organized around formation, not throughput
• Direct contribution to building a clinical training institute at a formative moment in its development
• Supervision of supervision, faculty consultation, and ongoing formational support within a structured development framework
• Salary commensurate with experience and scope; range discussed in full with qualified candidates
• A formation model that will ask something of you — and hold you while it does

To Apply

Submit a curriculum vitae and a cover letter. In the letter, tell us something true about your relationship to the work of clinical training — what you have learned to hold, what you are still learning, and what draws you to an institute that takes formation seriously as both a developmental discipline and a civic one.

We read cover letters with care. What you choose to name, and how you name it, is the first act of the application.  Application materials not accompanied by a cover letter will be considered incomplete.

Lorenz Clinic is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and formation-centered training community.